I would suggest trying either the hard drive clone script that's included with the debian package to replicate your SDCard raspbian install, or try imaging the SSD by connecting it to another computer (this is outlined in the manual).
Have you tried wiping the SSD and partitioning it via other ways (not imaging it) to see if it's compatible and working in with the Pi HAT add-on? There could be something funny going on there, too.
Well, you don't need to connect the mSATA card into something else directly, you can plug it in via USB to another computer. This is covered in the user manual, as the SSD connects to the Pi in the Pi Desktop via USB, so to can it connect to another computer.
When I bought the Kinston SSH I expressed chose a SATA storage as I was having in home a number of recovered SATA-to-USB external powered boards from old HDD external boxes. These was heavy small boards to power externally 5 inches HDD with 5V 2A power supplies. This was to have a larger storage on the Raspberry PI old versions and the multi boot bit never had been mentioned.
I also published an article on how to boot from SD card but using the external USB SATA connected HDD with the entire file system on it. The blog post (from 2015) is here: Meditech: RPI master storage system with some image of the first experimental tests while the disk setup procedure is here: Raspberry PI: USB hard disk boot
As I saw none of the mechanical HDD was powered correctly by the PI including the 2.5 HDD declared as self-powered by the USB connector. Also today I use a couple of 3TB Western Digital USB HDD that work properly only if directly connected to the computer USB; if I use a HUB for these disks I should use a powered USB HUB else stability problems in data transfer still occurs.
Applying the settings mentioned above things worked fine. The PI was anyway booting from the SD card no longer stressed during the normal usage.
Now with the introduction of the multi boot option settings in the PI3 things are working better and it was finally possible to remove the micro SD card.
Just a note: as in terms of reliability an SSD is more durable than the SSD card thinking to make a device that should work for long time boxed (maybe to a client site) it is the worth to use this setup instead of the traditional one despite the advantage of a larger storage space for the file system with a cost of 50-60$
We might be misunderstanding each other. My card was a true mSATA, came with just the drive. No connectors/enclosures/etc. I connected to the hat, booted off SD, dd'd to the mSATA.
So, I went on Amazon to get a connector. USB to SATA, then a card that converted SATA to mSATA. When I got it, I shut down the machine ready to take out the mSATA and put it into the adapter and run USB. I figured JUST for giggles I'd make sure one more time it didn't work. I already had the machine down, so I just pulled the SD card. Turned it on. Eventually got the 4 raspberrys, colorful screen, seemed to do that again, and finally booted Pixel. I shut down, restarted, and it seemed to be fine. Tried a few more times, worked. <SHRUG> Maybe I was too impatient the first time. But, the news is, I'm fine.
Stuck an 8GB microSD in the pi, booted it, updated/upgraded, installed dpkg of pidesktop-base.deb, but when I run ppp-hdclone, it has no selectable options for source or dest.
Source is blank, dest says "no items available"
I have an adata msata 128GB drive connected. Do I need to setup/format this drive first? Any steps I'm missing?
I just restarted the whole process over again, I continued to dig and think I got myself to a point where it's time to start over.
I just reflashed the latest rasbian + pixel image, and it's currently going through the apt-get update/upgrade process.
If I run your command, I get:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ ls -la /dev/sd*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 Apr 10 10:09 /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 Apr 10 10:09 /dev/sda1
I tried to install gparted as I read in another thread I would need to format the ssd first, but when running "sudo startx" it would give me an error about "agent already running" or similar, seemed like it couldn't run another graphical interface while I was already in one? Not sure about that. Then I tried to run "parted" and gave it a gpt label, and tried to make a primary ext4 partition, but that didn't seem to do anything, so starting over.
Any advice?
Edit: bit more info about current status:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 7.2G 3.7G 3.3G 54% /
devtmpfs 459M 0 459M 0% /dev
tmpfs 463M 0 463M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 463M 13M 451M 3% /run
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 463M 0 463M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1 41M 21M 21M 51% /boot
tmpfs 93M 0 93M 0% /run/user/1000
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/fstab
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
PARTUUID=038c4707-01 /boot vfat defaults 0 2
PARTUUID=038c4707-02 / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
# a swapfile is not a swap partition, no line here
# use dphys-swapfile swap[on|off] for that
